Monday’s edition of “The Freak Power Ticket” called attention to the Thursday, November 21st, 7pm screening of Medium Cool at the UC Santa Barbara Pollock Theater, with special guest Haskell Wexler, the writer/director of this protest classic from 1969. Fellow Santa Barbara resident/director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) will facilitate a post-screening Q&A with the 91-year-old industry legend, while UCSB Professor of Sociology Richard Flacks (a KCSB-FM programmer) will introduce the event.

On Monday, Greg Burris, a graduate student in UCSB’s Department of Film & Media Studies and one of the organizers of Thursday’s special event joined producer/host Ted Coe for an in-studio conversation about the film and its Carsey-Wolf Center presentation. Along with reflections on Wexler’s cinema-vérité masterpiece, the broadcast featured audio from Medium Cool and music from (or associated with) the film — by Frank Zappa, Love (with Arthur Lee), The Litter, Wild Man Fischer, Phil Ochs, Brother Bones & His Shadows, and more. An edited podcast of the program is now available online, below.

Filmmaker Haskell Wexler has made a name for himself by creating several politically-progressive documentaries, as well as directing two similarly-oriented works of fiction: the pro-Sandinista Latino (1985) and Medium Cool, a true-to-life depiction of events surrounding the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention protests, starring Robert Forster and Verna Bloom.

Wexler achieved his greatest acclaim as a director of photography, being named as one of the “10 Most Influential Cinematographers” of all time by the International Cinematographers Guild in 2003. His filmography includes: America, America (1963), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978), No Nukes (1980), Colors (1988), Canadian Bacon (1995), and a number of features by the independent-film icon John Sayles, including the coalminers’ union classic, Matewan (1987).

“The Freak Power Ticket” airs on Mondays in the Fall from 11am-12noon PST.